Recent review on carbon nanomaterials functionalized with ionic liquids in sample pretreatment application

Sample pretreatment is an important process in the analysis of complex samples such as food, biological and environmental samples due to numerous interferences in sample matrix and low concentration of targets. Carbon nanomaterials (CNMs) such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene (G) have been investigated as sorbents possessing strong absorbability in sample preparation. Recently, carbon nanomaterials functionalized with ionic liquids (CNMs-ILs) have been rapidly used as new sorbent with high selectivity for specific analytes or analyte class. ILs not only exhibit features such as variable miscibility, viscosity, and high thermal stability, but also have alterable ionic and organic moieties in their structure. This review focuses on recent applications of CNMs-ILs sorbents in sample pretreatment with special emphasis on the selectivity and extraction performance improvement for analytes by using CNMs-ILs, based on research published from 2012 to 2018. Furthermore, this review summarizes the functionalization methods of CNMs with ILs. (c) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.